1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a karaoke apparatus for converting an input voice and outputting the converted voice.
2. Description of Related Art
Recently, a variety of karaoke apparatuses have been developed that have a voice converting capability of providing a variety of effects by performing frequency conversion or the like on an inputted voice. For example, a karaoke apparatus is known in which a pitch or a formant of an input voice is shifted to convert a male voice into a female voice and vice versa. The formant represents resonance frequency characteristics of a vocal tract of a karaoke player.
This conversion between male voice and female voice by the conventional karaoke apparatus allows the karaoke player to manually specify the gender conversion. For example, when a male singer sings a female vocal song, he manually specifies the conversion mode of male-to-female. Then, if a female singer wants to sing a female vocal song, the previous conversion mode must be cleared. These operations must be performed every time a different song is sung, thereby presenting much inconvenience to the karaoke users. In addition, the complicated operations often result in the voice conversion setting errors. For example, although the input is a male voice, if the female-to-male conversion is specified, the input of the low voice is shifted to a further low voice, thereby sometimes offending the ear of audiences. Moreover, in the conventional voice conversion, the pitch shift and the formant shift are performed on an input voice regardless of its quality or property. therefore, depending on the voice quality, the converted voice often sounds unnatural.